Have the remains of Kristen Modafferi been found after 18 years?

Buster, a cadaver dog alerted to human decomposition in the basement of a home that a missing woman lived in 18 years ago on Thursday.

Kristen Modafferi, was attending summer school at the University of California at Berkeley and working at a coffee shop at the Crocker Galleria Mall in San Francisco, when she went missing on June 23, 1997.

Over the years it was thought that Robert Durst, the son of a New York real estate tycoon might be responsible for Modafferi’s disappearance. In March 2015, the police stated they could find no link.

On the Find Kristen website run by Dennis Mahon, the name Jon Onuma aka Jade Yoshino is a possible suspect. Onuma made anonymous calls to TV stations with names of people that he said had something to do with Modafferi’s disappearance, but the tips turned out to be bogus.

The San Francisco Chronicle in 1999 reported that Oakland police Sergeant John Bradley said that “He’s (Onuma) connected to the case. We’ve established inconsistencies with respect to his initial statement to us.”

On “America’s Most Wanted,” three women came forward and said that Onuma abused and tortured them psychologically and one woman stated that Onuma told her why he was abusing her, “I can’t let you go. Now you know what happened to Kristen Modafferi.” The woman did not know who that was at the time.

Mahon states that, “…it is possible that he is a world-class idiot but still not responsible for Kristen’s abduction.” But the bottom line is Mahon doesn’t really care about Onuma who died in 2006, but in finding Modafferi, and he hopes that his website will bring in tips that will do so.

After Buster’s first discovered the decomposition smell by smelling the vents on the side of the house, Paul Dostie, former Mammoth Lakes police detective and owner of Buster gathered the soil samples. The samples were given to the University of Tennessee to do the testing. They will be able to find out if there is human remains in the soil and narrow down the age.

Oakland police have been at the home and declared it a missing person case and not a crime scene.

It is unknown at this time how long before the results of the soil samples will come back.